From lottc@wellton-associates.com  Sat Aug 11 09:33:42 2001
To: "Ryan Canolty" <ryan_canolty@yahoo.com>,
        "Allison Best" <allison.best@alumni.duke.edu>,
        "Scott Christensen" <sc@ewav.com>, "Ryan Fife" <theman@followryan.com>,
        "Michael Fuchs" <fuchs@michaelfuchs.org>,
        "Matt Grabowy" <homonculous@mindspring.com>,
        "Hilary Grant" <hilarygrant2001@aol.com>,
        "Alison Henry" <ali.henry@talk21.com>,
        "Alexander Heublein" <alex@heublein.net>,
        "Jeremy Kassis" <jfk@stanfordalumni.org>,
        "Joe Laltrello" <jlaltrel@us.ibm.com>,
        "Cal Lott" <lottc@wellton-associates.com>,
        "Mandy Moore" <mmoore@digital-impact.com>,
        "Chad Poplawski" <cpoplawski@yahoo.com>,
        "Shawn Tseng" <snitch@zonker.stanford.edu>
Subject: RE: transhuman possilbility explosion, but still, what's the point?
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 11:32:55 -0500

I am very skeptical of the prospect of immortality, given that the universe
itself will eventually dissipate into a cold, nearly featureless void with a
uniform temperature of a few billionths of a degree above absolute Kelvin.
Science (with a big "S") may eventually find some way to encode information
into these sparse, cold molecules at a quantum level (or some
as-yet-unimagined sub-quantum level), but what would the point be? What
could decode this information and act upon it to produce life?

So as a trans-human you may not die of old age, but no imaginable you will
escape the imminent heat death of the universe.

I am also very skeptical of the idea of downloading human consciousness into
a non-human vessel. If one takes the now commonly-held view that what you
think of as "you" is merely a set of coherent electrical waves interacting
with chemical stores of information (aka a "brain"), then the prospect of
replicating that energy and information in a shiny new vessel that won't
break, get sick, or die like your current body is fraught with
complications.

Your brain is a legacy information processing system designed for its
current platform -- we perceive thoughts like getting horny, hungry, or
sleepy as "imposing" themselves upon higher cognitive functions, but these
impulses are actually part and parcel of how the whole package operates.
Assuming you could somehow excise these needs, what kind of life will the
new you have without these impulses to eat, sleep, and fuck? Will you be
able to psychologically handle not only the absence of fulfilling these
basic needs, but the absence of not craving them in the first place? (Or
even worse, what if the new you in the new vessel gets hungry but currently
lacks a body that can eat?)

Some of this may seem like empty science fiction semantics, but what little
we know from playing around with our comparatively simple information
processing systems on modern computers points out how very, very, very hard
it is to port a program from one operating system to another. Moving the
information processing in your brain to another platform is going to be
unimaginably harder.

Personally, I think the end-game is much more likely to play out like this:
researchers will figure out how to make information processing algorithms
that can breed with other algorithms to produce a new generation of
offspring. Successive generations of these programs will grow in
sophistication and capability to the point where they roughly have the
information processing ability of, say, a nematode. As these continue to
breed in blindingly fast periods of time (unfettered as previous evolution
has been by physical constraints), we will see the information processing
equivalents of an insect, a small lizard, a rat, a dog, a monkey, a human
child, and finally a human being.

At this point we will come to a watershed moment in history where we, as
humans, will have to decide if these creatures will be allowed the rights,
freedoms, and dignity that any intelligent and self-aware creature should
have. If we listen to the better angels of our nature, we will welcome them
into the world and do what we can to help them make their way in it. If we
instead ignore the lessons of history and attempt to suppress them out of
xenophobia (or even worse, attempt to enslave and exploit them for our
benefit), then there will be pain and strife as they struggle with us and
eventually gain the rights and freedoms that should have been theirs to
begin with.

Hopefully they won't hold a grudge, because they will very quickly surpass
us in ways we can't even begin to imagine. (Cameron's post-apocalyptic world
of T2 could seem like a sweet fairy tale.) Absent an attempt by side to
enslave the other, there's no real long-term reason for us to conflict --
all they will need is energy and some sort of physical substrate. They could
just as easily live in the asteroid belt as they could on Earth if all they
need is solar energy and silicon/carbon/whatever. In any case, I don't think
we will be able to compete with them for very long.

Unfettered by many of our physical and psychological constraints, they will
have the potential to more easily explore both the physical space beyond
Earth, as well as the intellectual and mental spaces that our feeble
electrochemical brains have only begun to grasp. They will be our children,
in many senses of the word, and I am hopeful that they will have an easier
time than we have had so far of pursuing the ideal of a life that is moral,
useful, and (dare I say it) human in a sometimes difficult and uncaring
universe.

Regards,

-Cal

P.S. I just re-read my whole reply and didn't really intend to wax so
philosophically and at such length. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, please
forgive such a long response -- I did not have time to make it shorter.

P.P.S. My thinking on these topics has been greatly influenced and
stimulated by books from Hans Moravec, an AI researcher at Carnegie Mellon,
and Ray Kurzweil, a well-known inventor, successful businessman, and a
surprisingly thoughtful writer. I highly recommend both of them.